News and Open Source Releases

Slackware is well known as a conservative distribution which rarely introduces sweeping changes. However, the world's oldest surviving Linux distribution introduced some significant changes this week which required a rebuild of the project's software packages: "Hi folks, and welcome to the third ever Slackware Mass Rebuild (and the longest ChangeLog entry in project history). There were two primary motivations for rebuilding everything in the main tree. The first was to switch to the new C++ ABI. The second was to get rid of all the .la files in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Really, having .la files installed has been mostly obsolete since things began to use pkg-config instead, but it's not easy to get rid of them unless you do it all at once. If you just take them out of one package, any other packages containing .la files that refer to the removed ones will be broken." How this rebuild will affect users and how to handle the change is covered in Slackware's changelog.